


Where Pleasure Moments Hung Before

by Highsmith (quimtessence)



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Death Fix, Character Study, Fix-It, Gothic, Horror Elements, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 03, Stranger Things Season 3 Spoilers, Temporary Character Death, Unsettling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-20 02:48:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20668049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quimtessence/pseuds/Highsmith
Summary: Opposite the parking lot, Billy Hargrove sways, standing in the snowy mush.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> A big chunk of this story came about almost two weeks ago, while 100% not in the right headspace to be either operating heavy machinery or writing fic. Only got around to finishing it now.
> 
> Title from "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap.
> 
> There's more, I guess. Stay tuned.

No one says it out loud, not where others could hear, not once July ends and August steamrolls over their town leaving dusty streets and sweat marks in its wake, but the summer Hawkins gets that year is _hot_.

Thick and cloying, the air hangs heavy in people's lungs. Scorching days melt into sickly-sweet summer nights. Hotter than they ever got in Hawkins for as far back as anyone still alive can remember. Hotter than is, strictly speaking, _normal_. But _shh_; not a peep.

Lazy mosquitoes buzz around the edges of neon signs. Sleeping deeply is easy once you ignore the whirring of helicopter blades, the rush of displaced air. Ignore how your sinuses pinch and your lungs heave in the humid night air.

Few things are normal anyway, not these days, but it clings in Steve's mind how strange it is to get muggy weather for August and well into September. It clings, and then he lets it go, a thought displaced.

Grey mornings and pale days and windy evenings—he misses them all. Misses them like you'd miss three hours' stretch of interstate: only when it's over and done with.

"Let's hang out," Robin says, and Steve has been waiting for the chance to show off with his ridiculous pool and his enormous house and his good booze, everything a teenager can imagine until the water becomes stifling and the house too large and the whiskey makes you puke on the guest bathroom floor.

September means rust-coloured leaves and Robin calling him after midnight with explanations and excuses. Homework. Parents. The future you have only one chance of getting right, and that chance means college and deadlines and not looking at girls in their skirts and not drinking yourself sick by Steve Harrington's pool.

Steve gets it.

But she sticks around. Sticks it out. She's the smart one, but, where it counts, they're both silly morons, stuck here together and barely holding on—holding on 'till Hawkins lets you go. If only Hawkins would let them go...

"We could leave," he says, or she says, or they both say it at other times and in similar places, late at night and early in the morning, at the same time after all. It's only words, and they both stay right where they are, so what does it matter who says it at all?

*

One day turns into one month turns into three months, and any job is _a job_, even stacking VHS tapes alphabetically. Steve hates it. It's too quiet before school lets out, quiet enough to let all the old thoughts in.

*

He's slacking off, and proud of it.

"You should get out. No, like, seriously." Pop of bubblegum, lipstick smudged, she's as carefully careless as ever, which means his ears perk up. Red flags. Her eyes don't meet his.

Steve's favourably impressed. And scared shitless. His eyes don't meet hers.

Consistently slacking off finally pays off—hiding behind the tapes, literally, and behind the figurative work, while he still can. Aggressively normal Indiana stock.

Meanwhile, Robin is too efficient. He has to slow her down, teach her how to goof off, how to stretch five minutes' work into two hours. The master is in, baby.

Two hours later, carelessly casual: "I will." And she knows he won't. Like, probably.

*

Next thing you know it's October, then moving into November it's as if the first snow of the season is right around the corner wherever you look, the wind hiding behind trees in wait to twist the snow around first chance it gets. The clouds lose their orange sheen at sunset, replaced by a pale pink, faded. The moon hides too often and sneaks up on you from behind the trees in shadows and spots on the insides of your eyelids.

He stops looking into the trees well before the first frost hits the tops of the cornfields.

*

December is wicked.

Too boring to mention and too lonely to forget.

Fuck Hawkins.

*

Against any odds, Keith trusts Steve to lock up at night sometime around the middle of January. Steve's touched; like, really.

She's leaning against the Beamer's passenger's side door. "Loser. You're buying." Pancakes. The strawberry milkshakes Robin pretends to hate. Steve can't get enough of underwhelmingly bland diner choices on plastic menus and sticky diner formica crawling beneath his palms.

Yowling cats behind the _Welcome to Hawkins_ sign shift in his rearview mirror, but the best waffles are three miles out of town, frozen asphalt be damned.

Across the woods on the other side of the street there's only white as far as the eye can see, icy and still. He parks on a patch of clear parking lot near the neon-fronted entrance. A collared retriever trails them inside, its fur speckled with glittering flakes in the yellowish diner lights.

It's all so very normal Steve's guts almost drop out of his stomach from the normality of it all.

*

It happens like this: They exit the diner, full up on waffles and pancakes and cherry cola and fruity milkshakes, and the air is thick like they're walking through water.

For a terrible moment, Steve can't breathe; then it flows out of him, and he inhales desperately on the next couple of breaths, eyes out of focus, tearing up from his lungs filling too quickly with air that's more icy shards than sweet relief.

He's only peripherally aware of the street lights breaking through the eleven o'clock pitch of a January night. Not when the shadows linger right beyond the reach of that artificial yellowness, darker than the black his eyes see when he switches off the lights in his bedroom, a warm kitchen one floor down to mellow the dark of days drawn short.

Almost reaching to grab at the ends of him, the shadows wink and throb now.

He shoves himself backwards, almost violently. Stumbles back a step, another, the shadows clutching at the light. Robin steadies his shoulder, his jacket's seams tight against his limbs.

With clear eyes, the woods are whiter than white where the diner lights hit, and by the side of the highway, opposite the parking lot, Billy Hargrove sways, standing in the snowy mush.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My tumblr](https://rhubarbdreams.tumblr.com) if you want to scream things at me. I don't know how to use it anyway.


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Someone came out of the patch of woods outside of Hawkins just last night," Mrs Brown, handing him his change in rusted pennies, confides._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You wouldn't know it from reading it, but at least 70% of this was written/edited while sober.
> 
> I meant to update Wednesday/Thursday, but then I didn't. Will I ever have a consistent posting schedule? Um. Is the wait worth it? HOW SHOULD I KNOW?!?
> 
> Also, this is now five chapters. Sigh.

Tick. Tock. The wall around the police station clock is a greying shade of yellowish white.

For far too long Steve sort of stares into the dregs at the bottom of the coffee cup they first handed him before it registers that the Deputy has been talking not only in his general direction but seemingly _to him_ for the past however many seconds minutes hours days he's been sitting unresponsive in the chair by Flo's desk. Someone pets him kind of gently on the shoulder several times, or several someone, or who knows. He doesn't slap at their hands, as far as he knows. Neither notion is comforting.

"Huh," which, as far as responses go, isn't the best in terms of furthering the conversation, is the most he can muster up, slow-blinking through the Deputy's next tirade. Not nearly enough, probably. For a while, at least, it has to be; he's said his peace hours ago.

Idly, it occurs to him that someone should really tell Billy Hargrove his family doesn't live here anymore.

*

"Someone came out of the patch of woods outside of Hawkins just last night," Mrs Brown, handing him his change in rusted pennies, confides.

Steve pockets it wordlessly, his palm itching to slap the counter by the register.

*

Later, he's going to tell it to anyone willing to ask him about it like he told it to the Deputy: Billy Hargrove wandered out of a snow-covered copse of tall trees, trembling, and sat with Steve on the curve while Robin phoned from back inside the warm, glowing diner. A sugary-sweet scent wafted to the spot where they sat together, Billy talking and Steve listening.

For right now, cheap wine between them while parked out near the quarry, he tells it to Robin as he remembers it: It was like being haunted a lifetime's worth in a matter of moments. The few moments it took his eyes to recognise whom they were looking at. Hargrove standing there, body shaking. Steve's voice not working right until it did, and now it does strange things when he mentions Hargrove's name. (He knows it does; he can read it in Robin's eyes.)

He has to tell it to her to avoid telling it to himself again, over and over, in the darkness which resides at the back of his mind.

Tonight, somewhere along the West Coast, Max is going to pick up the phone and hear Lucas's voice telling it a little like he heard it himself at the register that morning three people behind Steve in line and a lot how Steve told it to him in the Family Video parking lot that afternoon: Billy's back, and Max needs to get down here to make it right. Make him right. If anyone can, Steve's willing to bet it's her. (Someone should.)

*

There is no gauzy memory _here_. He wishes there would be.

In truth, it boggles his mind. But as boggled as his mind is at this stage, it is beyond him to not remember perfectly. A perfect memory, sharp as ice shards falling from the side of the roof onto unsuspecting concrete.

You see, he's gotten comfortable with not knowing things; that's what it is. He's wishing he didn't know a goddamn thing.

*

When Steve finds himself staring at the fine cracks in his ceiling, it's been twenty-four hours to the minute, wind now whistling outside his window, snow lashing at the glass. Twenty-four hours since he stood in a diner parking lot, stomach too full and breath too frozen to swallow down his dread.

The moon is fat and high, but the light hardly reaches from one end of his bedroom to the other. It might as well be a dandelion parachuting its seeds over the town from up in the night sky.

Steve tells it to himself once more, and it goes like this, how it happened: Teeth sharp and shiny and white, like crisp little aligned icicles on the outside wall of your house in the dead of winter, Hargrove smiled slowly at them once his trembling had subsided.

After that, Steve remembers hearing the wind howl only once, if that, the woods loudly silent.

The smiling went on for far too long, he's certain, like when the joke's too bad to let your mouth form words again.

Hargrove's body might have stopped shaking itself apart by then, but the smiling was worse, is worse, will always be the worst Steve remembers; that, and his body oddly taut and strangely straight-backed, as if securely anchored to itself like you'd be beneath a too-tight seat belt, limbs seemingly cautiously unsticking themselves before finally beginning the uneven walk towards Steve and Robin's side of the road.

Steve remembers Robin gasping beside him, saying, "Steve?" sort of like a question, but one he didn't understand or know how to answer, her hand no longer gripping at his shoulder, though maybe it should have been should he let go of himself and fall where he was standing.

The parking lot free of cracks and dents, no potholes in sight unless hidden by the snow and ice, and all the street lights offering a steady yellow glow, almost as if this lone diner outside of town isn't just a place between destinations. Then Hargrove did the unexpected: he started laughing, quickly turning it into a hysterical thing once the shock of it faded, fat tears almost hypnotising on his cheeks. (And, yet, the smiling's worse; Steve stands by that.)

That's when he sent Robin inside to make a phone call, leaving him and Hargrove alone. Steve can't recall where the dog went.

*

His ceiling sucks. Steve gets up to do his laundry in his empty house. The light bulb over the washer-dryer has the warmest glow.

By the time he's done, the dawn light creeps through his open bedroom window, daylight pale and a sizzle in the air anticipating a storm, but he climbs into bed, feeling bluntly exhausted.

*

The days and nights and days march on.

Then Steve realises with a start that it's been a week since finding himself staring at Hargrove took over every corner of his mind before promptly contracting into a type of knowledge he carries around with him by default. The memory of it all has not faded almost at all, except for becoming more like an incredible dream, as in a dream which is not credible. Steve has not spoken to Hargrove since; however, Steve has seen him balance his way towards existing again in snippets of moments around town for the first few days, an odd assortment of adults by his side.

Steve hasn't seen Max at all. Lucas says she never did come, and he's got a lot to say about this and more besides, but Steve couldn't really tell you what that might be.

Family Video is boring. The days are too short in winter, and the cold outside becomes a blistering thing which sneaks its way inside your bones, snug against your marrow, by the time Steve realises it's the seventh day after Hargrove's return.

Then, just as quickly as he came back, Hargrove disappears again, this time by virtue of Susan Mayfield, only one week late coming down from eternally-sunny Cali, and a very efficient visit with Hawkins's finest.

*

Steve would love nothing more than to tell himself some sort of balance has now been restored and even believe it, but he's a bad liar.

Besides, what balance is there in the world if a place like Hawkins still exists?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [My tumblr](https://rhubarbdreams.tumblr.com/), which I don't know how to use properly.


End file.
